Peace: before the war on Drugs

In turn-of-the century America, opium, morphine, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana were subject to few
restrictions. Popular tonics such as Vin Mariani and Coca-Cola and its competitors were laced with
cocaine, and hundreds of medicines—Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup may have been the most famous—
contained psychoactive drugs. Millions, perhaps tens of millions of Americans, took opiates and cocaine.
David Courtwright estimates that during the 1890s as many as one-third of a million Americans were
opiate addicts, but most of them were ordinary people who would today be described as occasional
users.

Careful analysis of that era—when the very drugs that we most fear were sidely and cheaply available
throughout the country—provides a telling antidote to our nightmare legalization scenarios. For one thing.
despite the virtual absence of any controls on availability, the proportion of Americans addicted to opiates
was only two or three times greater than today. For another, the typical addict was not a young black ghetto
resident but a middle-aged white Southern woman or a West Coast Chinese immigrant. The violence,
death, disease, and crime that we today associate with drug use barely existed, and many medical
authorities regarded opiate addiction as far less destructive than alcoholism (some doctors even prescribed
the former as treatment for the latter). Many opiate addicts, perhaps most, managed to lead relatively
normal lives and kept their addictions secret even from close friends and relatives. That they were able to
do so was largely a function of the legal status of their drug use.

But even more reassuring is the fact that the major causes of opiate addiction then simply do not exist
now. Late nineteenth-century Americans became addicts principally at the hands of physicians who lacked
modern medicines and were unaware of the addictive potential of the drugs they prescribed. Doctors in the
1860s and 1870s saw morphine injections as a virtual panacea, and many Americans turned to opiates to
alleviate their aches and pains without going through doctors at all. But as medicine advanced, the levels of
both doctor- and self-induced addiction declined markedly.

[...]

[...] On June 27, 1991, the Supreme Court
upheld, by a vote of five to four, a Michigan statute that imposed a mandatory sentence of life without
possibility of parole for anyone convicted of possession of more than 650 grams (about 1.5 pounds) of
cocaine. In other words, an activity that was entirely legal at the turn of the century, and that poses a danger
to society roughly comparable to that posed by the sale of alcohol and tobacco, is today treated the same as
first-degree murder.

[...]

Precedents for each of these penalties scarcely exist in American history. The restoration of criminal
forfeiture of property—rejected by the Founding Fathers because of its association with the evils of English
rule—could not have found its way back into American law but for the popular desire to give substance to
the rhetorical war on drugs.

[...]

History holds one final lesson for those who cannot imagine any future beyond drug prohibition. Until
well into the 1920s most Americans regarded Prohibition as a permanent fact of life. As late as 1930 Sen.
Morris Shepard of Texas, who had coauthored the Prohibition Amendment, confidently asserted: "There is
as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a humming-bird to fly to the planet
Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail."

History reminds us that things can and do change, that what seems inconceivable today can seem
entirely normal, and even inevitable, a few years hence. So it was with Prohibition, and so it is—and will
be—both with drug prohibition and the ever-changing nature of drug use in America.